I finished reading The Average American Male and I thought what a grim commentary on the American Male psyche. What is even more scary is that Chad Kultgen isn’t far off the mark in describing what men think about most of the day, which I am sure you have already guessed, is sex, videogames and more sex.

I remember one hard-ass, male-hating female lieutenant colonel who started one of her presentation to a group of cadets with the startling statistic that the average male thinks about sex every 7 seconds. Is this true guys? Do we really think about sex that much?

Chad Kultgen’s main characters certainly lays bare this static. In every single chapter he is having sex, thinking about sex, watching porno, jerking off, or fantasizing about sex with every single female he sees. He tells his friend Todd that he would fuck 98% of the women he sees. You get the impression that the other 2% must be invalid or near-death in order to not warrant being considered for any kind of sexual intercourse.

The Average American Male is like a triple X-rated version of John Gray’s book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. In fact, I wish one of you ladies out there would write the female version of The Average American Male. I would welcome a read of The Average American Female. I would love to know what women really think about?

Chad Kultgen paints women as Venus Flytraps. The women in his book basically do what ever it takes to lure men in (re fuck them every way imaginable multiple times a day), make them feel all funny inside (re love), and then, when the guy is sedated with thoughts of endless blissful sex, suck the soul out of them with marriage and leave them bumbling, porn watching, jerking off husks of men.

I would like to believe this is not true, but history tells me different, biology proves it, and psychology shows all the crazy things a guy will do for those inevitable last few seconds of mind-blowing orgasmic sex.

Women were designed to attract and keep men. Men were designed to make babies. This is how the species of man survives.

Ok. I am digressing into my own psychotic shit. Back to the book. The Average American Male is as brilliant as it is vulgar. As Toby Young put it, “I can’t figure out if this book is a heartfelt dispatch from the front line in the battle of the sexes, or a brilliant send-up of the way the male point of view has been misrepresented by militant feminists.”

I enjoyed reading about myself however painful it is to admit that all I think about is sex, sex, and more sex. Fuck the videogames!

If I thought that I were making
Answer to one that might return to view
The world, this flame should evermore cease shaking.

But since from this abyss, if I hear true,
None ever came alive, I have no fear
Of infamy, but give thee answer due.

Dante’s Inferno (Canto XXVII, lines 61 – 66)

1. Pursuit of Flesh

The monsoon rain fell heavy upon the jungle canopy, pounding relentlessly until he thought the rain would destroy the jungle. The rain had cooled the air so that now a dense fog lingered amongst the heavy vegetation and the darkness, making it nearly impossible for him to see where he was going. The night was never this dark in the civilised world – the world of men and cities.

He stood, pressed against a tree, hugging it like a long lost friend. The wet moss soothed his battered face. Fresh blood dripped from his swollen lower lip and mingled with the rain water coursing through the scattered trench lines in the bark. He wore no shirt and no shoes, only a tattered pair of U.S. Army jungle fatigues. Around his neck hung a pair of stainless steel dog tags that read, ‘Holis King, 255-09-3421, O Positive, Christian.’

Holis closed his blackened eyes and slipped his tongue out to catch the rain. He was tired and wary and needed to rest, but he also needed to run, for he knew that they would be coming for him soon. Already he could hear the baying of the hounds echoing through the jungle; their muffled cry competed against the pounding rain, making it hard for him to judge whether the hounds were near or far. At least the rain would mask his scent.

His tormentors would not be so easily deceived by the rain; they were excellent trackers, and the wet ground would more likely betray him. Besides, they knew the condition of his feet would not let him get very far, very fast. He could do nothing now but keep moving and pray the jungle would hide him like a frightened woman whose husband had come home to soon while her lover lie in her bed.

As punishment for his first attempt to escape, his tormentors had taking his combat boots and his shirt. His failed second attempt ended in a session with Phan Trong Chinh, the Doctor, as he was known amongst the inmates. They feared and loathed Phan Trong Chinh, but the mere whisper of his name by the camp guards was enough to make them compliant to their tormentor’s will. An appointment with the Doctor could last a few hours or a few days and never ended with the patient feeling better, but the memories cured any future thoughts of disobedience.

Holis had spent four hours with the Doctor. Four hours he spent crying like a newborn baby, four hours cursing the day he had been drafted in to the army, four hours denouncing the country he loved, four hours wishing he had never been born, and four hours wishing he could die.

Phan Trong Chinh had beat the bottoms of feet repeatedly with a bamboo stick rendering them into a mangled pulp of blood and shredded flesh. The Doctor, his eyes alight with sardonic laughter, had delivered each blow with orgasmic intensity, sweating and panting at each yelp of pain that escaped Holis’ quivering lips.

For his recovery, they shoved him in a metal box that afforded him only enough room to lie curled in the foetal position. The cell had no light; it’s only air hole doubled as the drainage hole for his excrement. He laid in the darkness of his cell until time became no time; his past, present, and future mixed with the acrid smell of blood, sweat, and urine. His only comfort was the Code of Conduct he whispered over and over to himself:

I am an American fighting man. I serve in the forces which guard my country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense.

If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape.

I will never forget that I am an American fighting man, responsible for my actions and dedicated to the principles which made my country free. I will trust in my God and the United States of America.

When his tormentors had deemed he had learned his lesson, they released him from his box. He could not stand on his feet for weeks and was reduced to having his fellow inmates carry him around the camp on a stretcher.

Holis did not try to escape again – until now.

That his tormentors had had not found him yet was a miracle, and if he wanted to remain free, he needed to keep moving under the darkness and cover of the rain and fog. He knew that if he headed south, he would eventually reach friendly lines and the salvation of his own troops.

To be continued…

I was bored out of my mind at a presentation when I drew this:

(Click the image for a larger view)

From what I have read, I like the guy.  He seems to be a person with vision.  People, who know what they are about, inspire me.  The fact that he has come from a modest background and worked his way to be in a position to run for the Presidency of the United States as a serious contender.  And he is only 46.  That to me is impressive.  I am impressed because he picked a path and followed it.  When I look through his CV, his books, his speeches, his career, they all seem to be aligned with getting to where he ultimately wants to be – the President of the United States.

I know we are not meant to compare ourselves with others, but when I look at myself at age 39, just 7 years younger than Obama, I have to wonder, could I run for president of the U.S. in 7 years?  The odds are probably not.  Would I want to? Again probably not.  My point is I have not done the things that would be necessary for me to be a viable contender.

I have not paid much attention to U.S. politics for a long time.  I was in a I want to do something that I normally don’t do kind of mode this morning, so I bought a copy of Time magazine because it had a full picture of Barack Obama with the words ‘The Contender� super imposed across him.

The article’s focus was on his recent change in tactics and tried over-emphasize that he was using old school tactics, which he said he would not do.  The writer argues that it is Obama’s freshness that has captured people’s attention and this latest turn in tactics might tarnish that freshness.

Despite the writer’s attempt to raise doubt, I actually found myself admiring Obama and being the information junkie that I am, I immediately started searching the Internet for my information o Obama.  I like the guy. And though I have mainly been a republican supporter since my army days, I would consider voting for Obama.

Ah…I’m back from the land of the sick.  I’m rarely ever ill.  But when I am, I have found that the best way for me to get back on my feet quickly is to hibernate for 24-48 hours.  I eat very little and I sleep loads.

And now, like the bear waking up from hibernation, I am hungry as hell for EVERYTHING!

“People say that we’re searching for the meaning of life.  I don’t think that’s it at all.  I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences in the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.â€?  – Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Nike had a brilliant ad campaign to inspire people to action.  The commercials asked the question:  why ask why. Just do it.

Why do we search for meaning in our being here?  Why do we question what our lives are for?  Why can’t we be happy just to be?  The ancients tried to make sense of the world by finding out how things worked rationally.

So in the beginning man worshiped the sun and the moon and mother earth and all these things were gods to them.  They used the gods to explain why things happened the way they did.

And then something happened.

People decided to test the system.  What would happen if I didn’t sacrifice my goat to appease the thunder god?  When nothing happened man said ah.  So what makes thunder happen then?

We began our search for how our world really worked.

In the 17th century, the age of reason, we went in search how things worked using reason to understand how our world worked.  In the 18th century, the age of exploration, we went in search of where we were on the planet.  We went in search of the physical space in our geography.  In the 19th century, the industrial revolution, we went into what to do what with the knowledge we had gained and built big factories and machines to harness what we had learned.  The 20th century became the age of me.  People went in search of a better lifestyle through brokering information and gaining personal power through material wealth.  In the 21st century, we find ourselves searching for meaning again.  Why am I here?  There is sense of lack of spirituality.  The 21st century has become the age of self-help.

The search for meaning is gnawing at our minds.  It is the splinter in our mind’s eye that is sending us in search of the question.  It’s the question that drives us as Trinity reminded Neo.  A lot of the people I coach seem to be searching for something – something more out of life.  They look around at where they are now and in terms of material well being they have the things they need to survive and for the most part to live comfortably.

But being comfortable is no longer a comfort.  They want more.  They are tired of being comfortably numb.

In the Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac describes a scene where all the middle-class people are sitting at home plugged into the same television shows, being pumped full of nothing, while characters like Jaffry prowl the wilderness, embracing life.

We don’t want to be comfortably numb anymore.  We want to live on purpose.  What is the point of life?  We marvel at what we have and what we have created yet we cannot understand why we are here.

A growing discontent is out there.  We have books springing up like the Celestine Prophecy that gnaw at the edges of the societal angst that consumes us.  It’s about a lack of spirituality – a lack of understanding of who we are, and why we are here.  We long to find our place and purpose in the universe.

Our comfort zones have become prisons that hold us in place and keep us from reaching our full potential.  I can image the faces pressed against the plastic bubble of our comfort zones as we look out beyond the edge and wonder what our my lives could be like on the other side of this wall?

Echoing Morpheus’ words, we are slave; guarded by walls that we cannot see, or touch, or taste – a prison for our minds

And so I find myself sitting in a dingy café that lured me in with the offer of free Internet access.  Only the access is not really free.  You have to buy their coffee, of course.  But also the only ‘free’ Internet access is their website!  I could have just as well stayed in my hotel room had I known such was the case.  And to top it all off, it’s been 20 minutes and I still don’t have my cup of coffee yet.

It’s a Monday evening.  I’ve been up since 4 am.  I flew up to Scotland on the red eye and went straight into work with my client until 17.30.  Egats man! I’m tired, but I feel obligated to get some words on the page and post on the blog.

This whole writer’s journey thing has been a crazy up and down ride.  Every time I think I have it sussed, I get side tracked by something else.  And then I get back on the Path after a sabbatical of how ever long.  Only to notice that more time has passed.

But I recon, I am reaching the perfect age to start reflecting on and sharing my experiences over the last 39 years.

My areas of passion are philosophy, psychology, spirituality, and religion and being a fallible human being.  More specifically, how these disciplines and fallibility help us to understand ourselves in order that we can fully realise our potential.

I am an everyday man.  A scholar I am not.  So I don’t see myself approaching these topics from an academic perspective.  I see myself approaching them as a naked philosopher and poet trying to make sense of the world I live in.

I don’t know where this is going to lead me.  But at this point, I think it is irrelevant.  What matters is I want to pursue an idea – a dream – I have long harboured for many years.

During my Saturday morning surfing, I came upon these three sites:

http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/

http://www.nikinielsen.com/bio.html

http://www.areyoumywife.blogspot.com/

These sites have really got me thinking about my dreams.  I have tended to do one thing to the next without much connection between any two points. I have an idle dream of being a writer, but have struggled with finding my writer self over the many long years.

What these websites reminded of is that you have to PURSUE your dreams, not sit idle and WISH your dreams to come true.

No turkey for me today. Being an expat, I haven’t celebrated Thanksgiving in 6 years and it was only reading a post from Raw Dawg that reminded that today is Thanksgiving.

I am about as far away from the Thanksgiving tradition as I can get. I’m away from home, alone, in Scotland having a Chinese buffet for dinner.

I don’t often take the time to reflect on just how far remove from America I am. I no longer have a feel for what is going on in America at the street level and the only news I get is through the British press, which of course has a European slant. I guess I could read the local news on the Internet, but I’m too busy reading all the great blogs out in blogshere to bother.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, here is what I am thankful for:

– I am thankful for my family and friends
– I am thankful for my health and the health of those close to me
– I am thankful for having a life not full of strife and contention
– I am thankful that I have material comfort
– I am thankful for my spiritual well-being
– I am thankful for being on The Path
– I am thankful for all the cool people I have met through this blog

I am sure there a thousand other things I could give thanks for, but at the risk of boring everyone to death, I’ll stop there.

God Bless and have a great Thanksgiving holiday,

Clay Lowe

“Writers are always watching people. In order to have output, we need to have input.”

I am a tired puppy tonight. And once again, I ate the foulest tasting hamburger in the world. But there you go; at least I had something to eat.

I need to go on a reading sabbatical. I started Ken Wilber’s One Taste and within the first few pages I had a long list of philosophers, thinkers, scientists, poets, psychoanalysts, and writers whose work I feel compelled to find and explore. The list includes:

Kant
Hegel
Spinoza
Marx
Fichte
Freud
Nietzsche
Einstein
Schopenhauer
Leibniz
Aldous Huxley
Thomas Mann
Christopher Isherwood
Gerald Heard
Krishnamuriti

I better get started then…

A quick commercial for a really cool event we’re running in December. If you’re in the area, please do come along. I promise it will be fun, informative, and full of magical moments.

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How can an evening’s learning be so much fun and still be life changing? How can you learn some tools and techniques in just 3 hours that will enable you to achieve your goals, manage how you feel and respond to situations and improve the quality of your personal and professional relationships?

How would you like to learn the techniques used by people like Paul McKenna & Derren Brown?

Well, the simple answer is to come along to Trinity College in Leamington Spa on December 7th and find out.

We’re launching a brand new course through Trinity College in NLP – Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It’s an approach to developing personal performance, based on understanding and changing our mental processes and view of the world.

Just imagine – if you could develop better relationships, communicate even more effectively and realise your wildest dreams, what would that mean to you, and to the people close to you?

To give you a unique opportunity to find out more we’re running a taster evening. There’s no cost, and it’s the perfect time to see NLP in action, discover how it works for you, take away some powerful tools that you can use right away and meet the training team. You can ask questions, make friends, chat, relax, be entertained and of course learn skills that have the potential to change the course of your life.

The course itself comprises 12 evenings, and if you want to take it further, a 4 day certification module.

All you have to do now is use the form above or call Sarah Bartlett at Trinity College on 01926 428416 to secure your place.

Labels. Labels. Labels.

We have this innate need to label things. I realise labelling is a part of our survival mechanism. Back in the day running around in the jungle, we needed to label things, good, bad, dangerous, poisonous, friend or foe.

And the labels were signals to the brain to act accordingly in relationship to the label.

So if I stumbled upon another human in the jungle, I might label the person friend and go up and hug the person and exchange juicy gossip about what so and so was caught doing in the village.

If I labeled the person foe then my brain would either give me the signal to fight or flee. This same functionality is still with us today.

Soren Kierkegaard turned us on to the problem with labels: once you label me, you negate me. This equally applies to how we label ourselves. I often struggle with how to label myself for other people. Am I a writer, coach, trainer, philosopher, or consultant?

We tend to answer the question ‘what do you do?’ by saying what we are. The dialogue goes like this:

“So what do you do?�

“I am a writer…�

When in fact I should answer the question by saying “I write.�

Now if the person asks me ‘who are you?’ I answer with my name. ‘I am Clay.’ And ‘what do you do Clay?’

I am a:

a writer

a coach

a trainer

I run my own business

In fact labels can be changed and interchanged depending on what you need to use the label to do.

Writer is a label that is useful for me.

Philosopher is a label that is useful for me.

Thinker is a label that is useful for me.

Coach is a label that is useful for me.

Training Consultant is a label that is useful for me.

In a world that wasn’t obsessed with labels, I would be happy to just say “I AM.”

Instant happiness is

FORGET the past; FUCK the future, BE here now!

(early morning insight while lying in my hotel bed)

Work life balance is a myth. To be balanced is to be mediocre. Even Jesus eluded to this in the Book of Revelations: ‘…you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other. So, because you are lukewarm I am about to spit you out of my mouth.’ What I have noticed is in my attempt to lead a balanced life, I have become Joe Average. When my life was unbalanced and chaotic, I constantly pushed the limits of how far I could go. I spent a lot of time on the edge in danger of falling off. The edge is intoxicating because you learn things about yourself you might never have had the opportunity to learn in ordinary circumstances.

My life is less chaotic now, more stable and balanced. But balance, as I have seen it, has brought boredom, frustration and a little irritation. I feel like the caged bird. Only I don’t feel much like singing. I feel like ripping the fucking cage up and beginning again.

Life coaches would have you balance the Wheel of Life. Knowing what I know now, I would say scrap that, choose what most appeals to you and then pour all of your energy into the pursuit if that one area.

The map is not the territory. If you have the territory, why would you need a map? A map presupposes a destination, an endpoint to obtain, a goal. If I sent you an email that read, “Meet me in Wales next Thursday at 10:02am as a matter of urgency. By the way, after I send this message, you won’t be able to contact me further.”

If you know where Wales is, you could make a start but the chances are you wouldn’t find me next Thursday. In fact, it would probably take you a lifetime to find me there without more specific information.

If I said meet me at the very top of Snowdon at 10:02 next Thursday, you would be able to find me if 1) you have an accurate map of Snowdon in your mind, i.e. you have been there many times before and have an accurate memory of the territory, or 2) you have the necessary physical maps you would need to get you to the top of Snowdon from where ever you are right now, or 3) you know someone who knows how to get to Snowdon or could ask someone who knows.

The ‘map’ is a guide to the territory. If you don’t have any particular place to get to within the territory, do you need a map? Any direction you choose is as good as any other. As the Cheshire Cat famously illustrated when Alice asked the question: “Would you tell me please which way I ought to go form here?”

“That depends a great deal on where you want to get to,” replied the Cheshire Cat.

“I don’t much care where,” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

I have been looking for maps to help guide me through my life. Which presupposes I have somewhere to get to. If that’s the case, where do I want to go? Isn’t BEING here enough?

I was visiting one of my West Point Classmate’s website and found this little gem tuck away on her site.  It’s a video of Cadet Basic Training better known as Beast Barracks.  Brings back some fond memories!
[youtube]RbmRZKIbSRY[/youtube]

The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the source of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand in rapt awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exits, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms, this knowledge, this feeling, is the centre of true experience.

Some of you may recognize these words as those of the preeminent physicist, Albert Einstein. I came across the words while studying some universal laws to which I had know of intellectually but had not put into practice very much. But as I reflect back on the periods in my life when I have had the privilege to tap directly into this source, this magical mystical flow, I realized that these were times when I was at my absolute best. I was firing on all cylinders: mind, body and spirit in tune, in flow and in harmony with everything around me.

Over the past week, I have been drawing a mandala daily as a part of a research project I am doing. The mandala is like a mind mirror in which you can find valuable clues from your subconscious mind. I have an article on mandalas which I’ll make available on the blog later. I also use the mandala as a projective coaching tool on Ascent and recently, I have been running mandala workshops. The workshops have inspired me to start collecting empirical data to be used as the basis of a book on mandalas to support my workshops. If you are interested in participating as a subject, post a comment or send me an email.

Ah the joys of coming home and the anticipation of sleeping in my own rack.  I had a late flight in from Scotland.  I used BMI Baby instead of Fly “May” BE.  The BMI Baby crew actually seem to have pride in their company and treat their customers with a little dignity and respect and on top of that, the plane got us to Birmingham 20 minutes early!  Well it’s late and I’m up early tomorrow for pretty much an all day meeting followed by another engagement in the evening.  Time for some much needed shut eye.

Question number 53 is courtesy of those funky business boys.  The Nobel Prize winning Mr. Henry Kissinger is reputed to have started a press conference with the question: ‘Does anyone have any questions for my answers?’  Which reminds me of the poster of a monkey scratching his head underneath a caption that said, “just when I thought I had all of life’s answers, they changed the questions.”

The barista in training told me there were several good places to eat in Stirling. I told him I would be here for several weeks which would give me plenty of time to try them all. I told him tonight though, I want a burger.

“Where can I go to get a good burger?” I implored.

“Ah that’ll be The Filling Station just down the way. They make an awesome burger.” I finished my coffee and dashed back to my hotel to pick up my copy of funky business forever. I thought Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordstrom might make good dinner companions.

The Flagship Golden Lion Hotel is my home for the next three days. From the moment I walked into the lobby, I didn’t like the place. My dislike grew when I walked into the closet they were calling my room and I absolutely went through the roof when I found out they didn’t have WiFi. According to the welcome pack, “Unfortunately we don’t have Internet access in our hotel but the central library in the city centre is the perfect place to go. They have free Internet access Monday to Saturday from 9.30 am until 6.00 pm.” That would be fine I suppose If I were here as a tourist, but not so good if you’re on business. Not to worries though, this would be my big chance to try out the Vodafone mobile WiFi unit I bought a few weeks ago. I knew it would come in handy sooner or later.

I wander into The Filling Station and ask the lone waitress for a table for one. The place is decked out in old filling station paraphernalia – old Shell and Esson petrol cans, rusty bumpers and old street signs. I immediately spot the spicy hot wings and the Bison burger with bacon and mozzarella cheese.

While I’m waiting for my bison burger, Ridderstrale and Nordstrom tell me that “markets are simply big conversations where sellers and buyers exchange information to determine the price of something.” Radical thinking? Or how about, “America’s success lies in its ability to mop up the greatest talent. The brightest minds from China, India, Russia and Brazil and elsewhere flock to the US. Why? Because the US is an idea not a country.”

The spicy hot wings were sweat on the brow, nose dripping, mouth burning hot! And I would have to say they are the best hot wings I have had in the UK. They are a close second to the world famous Jay’s Elbow Room hot wings. The Bison burger, on the other hand, is a disappointment. I had dreams of it being as good as the bison burger I ever had down on South St in Philadelphia. The bun let the bison burger down. The bun is just as important as the burger. They are a team. In this case, the bun failed to enhance the overall experience of the burger and I left wishing I had just order two or three servings of the hot wings.